After 1 minute on my modem (2016)

https://1-minute-modem.branchable.com/

by BuuQu9hu • 10 years ago

409 144 10 years ago

1-minute-modem.branchable.com

This is awesome, and actually a pretty neat way of evaluating websites.

A surprising number of people are still on low bandwidth connections, while it's probably not reasonable to optimize for them, it's at least worth considering that market occasionally.

adrianN• 10 years ago

If you optimize for people on low bandwidth connections, you automatically also optimize for those with limited mobile data. And as a bonus, your website becomes faster for everybody with a fat pipe too.

vortico6• 10 years ago

"Optimize" is somewhat the wrong word. "Straying from temptation" would be more accurate, since all garbage on webpages is placed there by a website manager's overzealous want to increase popularity or profit.

ioquatix• 10 years ago

I fought so hard for this at one of my current customers. But, no, we have Mbyte+ image maps for our pricing plan selection pages.

tribby• 10 years ago

while it's probably not reasonable to optimize for them

it's not an optimization, it's a best practice on the web. server side render and use javascript for progressive enhancement.

BuuQu9hu• 10 years ago

The web has moved on from progressive enhancement. Current practise is client-side HTML rendering.

superflyguy• 10 years ago

To be fair, the market is considered occasionally but a for-profit site isn't going to go out of its way to cater for those people with little money.

masklinn• 10 years ago

Low bandwidth is but one component, the other two are delay and packet loss.

I spent the holidays at my parents's, they're hooked to 1024kbps ADSL[0], so theoretical 128kB/s. Effectively it hovers between 80k and 120k which is fine…-ish: the connection will regularly jump to ~7% packet loss and 2000±1000ms ping. Downloading at 80k is one thing, downloading at 80k with 3s round-trip and 1 packet in 15 missing things get much trickier, especially when most pages have a really high number of resources.

[0] and nothing better is currently available short of cellular (they do get ok 4G, at least when the weather doesn't screw with it), though they're supposed to get fibre a year or two down the line

trevyn• 10 years ago

What browser is this?

deathanatos• 10 years ago

The first few screenshots appear to be Firefox; further down the page is Chrome.

lokedhs• 10 years ago

That looks like Firefox.

truncheon• 10 years ago

Uh, the point is that, on a slow connection, everything is going to suck in unpredictable ways, because of server-side bloat, and the trendiness of developers deploying 5MB js libraries.

Worrying about whether the browser was recent or supported misses the point. Any browser can suffer these sorts of problems on a 56KB dial-up connection. (3G mobile data is frequently throttled at 128KB by popular ISP's, btw)

frumiousirc• 10 years ago

Uh, reading in a whole slew of things into a simple question is missing the point.

2bluesc• 10 years ago

Could probably automate this on a Linux VM using netem[0]

[0] https://wiki.linuxfoundation.org/networking/netem

vortico6• 10 years ago

If you use vimperator (http://www.vimperator.org/) on Firefox, put this in your ~/.vimperatorrc so you can disable CSS with the "s" character (and re-enable it with Shift-S). It removes 99% of bullshit from web pages and allows you to read articles the way Tim Berners-Lee intended, guaranteed!

    nmap s :emenu View.Page Style.No Style<CR>
    nmap <S-s> :emenu View.Page Style.Basic Page Style<CR>

kqr• 10 years ago

Thanks. This is actually really great. Not only for testing my own web sites, but also for getting rid of a lot of the bullshit on other sites. I'll try to remember I have this shortcut now!

hf• 10 years ago

Neat, thanks. Works identically with the slightly smaller fork called Pentadactyl (http://5digits.org/pentadactyl/).

necessity• 10 years ago

For me it turns every page completely blank.

Santosh832• 10 years ago

Is there a significant difference between this function and simply hitting the standard View -> Page Style -> No Page Style menu?

vortico6• 10 years ago

Nope, it's just quicker. Also, my menu bar is hidden and I don't know how to get to it.

dotancohen• 10 years ago

Thank you, this is terrific!

keypress2• 10 years ago

Opera has or used to have a user styles feature, that you can use to do something similar, I used to dump the sites CSS and use my own.

keypress2• 10 years ago

It also has a disable images button.

throwanem• 10 years ago

If you don't use Vimperator, reader mode's usually good for this, too.

csydas• 10 years ago

My only issue with reader mode is that many sites seem to beat it with the stupid"load rest of article button" so you can't just load it all through reader.

On iOS I usually try to load articles in between stops in the subway and frequently cannot get just the article without being bothered by the rest of the nonsense on the page. I am ooen to the idea I might be just using readermode wrong but I'd have it on by default if I could be assured I'd actually get a full article each time.

johnvaluk• 10 years ago

You can get similar results by toggling usermode:

    map s :set invusermode <CR>

Then you can just use the same key to switch back and forth.

monochromatic• 10 years ago

That's... such a good idea.

CaptSpify2• 10 years ago

I've actually just been disabling css via umatrix, but yes. I've found that disabling JS makes sites load at decent speeds, and disabling CSS makes sites readable again.

I'd love to be able to control umatrix via vimperator though

suhith• 10 years ago

This is gold.

I've seen so many of these, even on websites with lots of traffic. Websites have to be written taking into consideration the way it loads too, especially on mobile data. I've found the Chrome DevTools feature where you can throttle bandwidth comes in super handy for this.

Laforet• 10 years ago

For resilience testing I highly recommend Clumsy even if it only runs on Windows:

https://jagt.github.io/clumsy/

krylon4• 10 years ago

When I went online for the first time (nearly twenty years ago - time goes by pretty fast!), I did so on 14.4 kbit modem.

That was no fun even back then. After a year, I upgraded to ISDN, which was a lot faster (64kbit), but once I got to use a faster line, even ISDN seemed awfully slow.

And the trend continues to this day. Once one has a faster connection, one gets used to it in no time. And just like many companies and individuals have solved problems with slow software by throwing more/faster hardware at it, these days we solve the problem of web sites making inefficient use of bandwidth by throwing more bandwidth at it.

Which might not even be such a bad thing - I would not like going back to programming in an environment where I have to triple-check every variable to see if I can shave off a couple of kilobytes, either.

But even a fast connection gets clogged at times, and even on a 16MBit DSL line, I have seen pages looking broken because the request for getting the CSS timed out or something like that.

Maybe taking more care not to waste bandwidth should be considered a form of courtesy. People on slow/saturated lines will thank you for it, and people on fast lines will be amazed at how snappy that website loads. (And of course, there's always trade-offs involved; I do not demand web developers sacrifice everything else to efficient bandwidth usage; but it should not be ignored, either.)

SubiculumCode2• 10 years ago

I remember when I upgraded to a 14.4k modem and boy was I pleased after dialing with a 9600 baud for years.

keithnz• 10 years ago

I remember 300 baud connections! :) because the "fast" 2400 ones were all in use.

Nothing quite like watching characters being drawn at typing speed :) least on IRC it wasn't too bad unless it was a busy channel

peterclary• 10 years ago

Luxury. I started out on 1200/75. I used to dream of 2400, let alone 9600!

('ad to lick code clean wi' tongue, etc. etc.)

vic-traill• 10 years ago

I'll pitch in here with a 300 bps acoustic coupler claim, back when bps == baud [0].

Bought the coupler and a Volker Craig VT100 terminal (complete with still-attached security chain) for $50 CAN from an Admin at my university who had no doubt pinched it from his employer.

This allowed me to dial in and work on programming assignments at the last hour, when the labs were full but open dial-up ports always available.

Don't know when I got rid of the coupler - I felt like a high-tech dude dialing the number, listening for the carrier and then placing the receiver in the cups.

[0]http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Modem-HOWTO-23.html

Santosh832• 10 years ago

Well balanced. And keep in mind that much of the emerging web users across the world are on mobile connections, which, even if using 3G or 4G or higher, are in practice much slower than advertised and latency ridden, due to load and outright corruption by the service providers. Not to mention metered bandwidth is still the norm outside select areas.

lucaspiller• 10 years ago

outright corruption by the service providers

This isn't limited to just the 'developing' world. Last year I was living in Italy and my phone service was provided by Vodafone. When visiting some popular websites (the biggest I remember was anything owned by Gawker Media) I would be redirected to unrelated spam sites a few seconds after the page loaded. Hitting back did nothing, even going back to the search results and pressing the link again did the same. If I fired up my VPN it worked fine though :D

curun1r• 10 years ago

Perhaps, and all I have is anecdotal experience, but having spent most of the last year traveling around Southeast Asia, I was stunned by how much better their wireless service was. For $10-$15/mo, I was getting more data, at faster speeds and with less latency than I get here in the US for roughly 3x the cost. The coverage was also pretty excellent.

I have no doubt that certain countries (probably in Africa) may be worse, but I think it's a mistake to look at the third world the way you're portraying it. In many cases, they're not deprived or years-behind in the way you've described. In many cases, they're significantly ahead of us.

agumonkey2• 10 years ago

I remember having to wait at a friend's flat in 2004, that only had a 56K line. For the average webpage, online chat and even occasional mp3 download it felt alright. Not sluggish, not cringey, not anger triggering.

It's also a maturity thing. At one point 1) you're not chasing new "needs" 2) you know how much a few buys you.

I keep seeing people asking for optic fiber I'm going wild. Turns out they all want multiple HD streaming and 50GB Steam games (I wonder if Steam is has lazy game content streaming somewhere...). It's a fad luxury. Not long ago I think we would have been nicely happy with 2x 720p, which is possible on a 5Mbps line I think. I'm still happy when I get a linux ISO in 10min or so. I don't think I'd be crazy joyful if it came in 20 seconds.

ido2• 10 years ago

why do you even need to stream more than a single movie at a time?

I upgraded from 16mbit/s to 50mbit a couple years ago and didn't really notice the difference. Now I could get 400mbit but didn't bother.

chalupa-man3• 10 years ago

You can stream anything at any bitrate, but 2x 720p on 5 Mbps would be a very extreme case. That would be a third to a quarter the bitrate of a 20-year-old DVD, or 3.5 - 7% the bitrate of a Blu-ray disc. That's less than half the 'Extremely Low' preset of the Sorenson encoder, the lowest you can go without defining custom options.

driverdan• 10 years ago

Your point is valid but the load time of modern sites is nowhere near comparable to dialup.

I started on 2400 and had 28.8k through high school on bad phone lines. I used to play solitaire while waiting for web pages to load. Some would take minutes!

I now have gigabit fiber and everything is so fast. A lot of sites are bloated and may take seconds to load on slower DSL but it's still orders of magnitude faster.

userbinator• 10 years ago

On the other hand, as long as the latency is similar, the SSH experience is pretty much the same regardless of bandwidth --- the exception being commands that produce plenty of output.

That might be part of why I've found newer programmers seem to write more complex and inefficient code than older ones, who tend to come up with simple and efficient solutions naturally. I think everyone should experience using and programming in a constrained environment, if only to train this skill of what's efficient and what isn't.

handyman5• 10 years ago

You are not controlling for the programmer's age as a variable. An equally valid explanation could be that newer programmers have less experience to draw from, where older programmers have more experience and know what works and what doesn't. Or, alternatively, newer programmers might just be a much larger pool of people, and perhaps more people stop programming as they get older than start, so that the average skill of an older programmer is much higher than you might otherwise expect (since all the low-skill programmers quit when they were younger).

krylon4• 10 years ago

I think everyone should experience using and programming in a constrained environment

FWIW - when I can, I like to to use a - relatively - resource-constrained machine to test my code on, so performance hiccups one would not even notice on a high-end desktop PC become obvious. I used to use a SparcStation for that, but it went the way of all earthly possessions. So now, I use a Raspberry Pi, and an old laptop (it has a "Built for Windows Vista" sticker, so it must have been built before 2009/Q3) for this purpose. It is a luxury I have when programming in my spare time, to use this as the bar - if I cannot get a program to run reasonably well on those machines, I consider it a failure (or a candidate for optimization, when I am in the mood...).

GFK_of_xmaspast• 10 years ago

I would not like going back to programming in an environment where I have to triple-check every variable to see if I can shave off a couple of kilobytes

That's called "embedded development" and sometime's it's fun to visit but I'm glad not to live there.

krylon4• 10 years ago

Some of my friends work in embedded development, so I have at least a second-hand feeling of what it's like to have to get the code work with only 64k of RAM.

To be fair, most of the problems these people seem to face are relatively simple (at least a lot of the time) compared to writing multi-threaded web servers with two database backends (one relational, one NoSQL) using 47 different varieties of XML to represent the same data, but in slightly different ways that only become apparent once one has spent a few weeks reading the specs before going to sleep, until one dreams of the perfect file or something.

I know embedded developers have their own fair share of troubling problems; I am so glad that even the worst bug I could ever come up with would be unable to endanger human lives. I start transpiring like a hippo just thinking about a user being really unhappy with a piece of code that I wrote; I seriously don't want to know what it's like if your bug has killed people.

(Embedded development covers a wide range of problems, of course, but inevitably, some of those are going to have to do with transporting human beings across an ocean, safely, or something like that. I do not envy the people that have to write that kind of code.)

cyrusmg• 10 years ago

I have seen something similar on Ryanair.com - this is why I chose React instead of Angular when I was looking for a new frontend framework

andygambles• 10 years ago

Currently only have a 1.2M connection at home. Reveals how bandwidth intensive many website are that simply do not need to be.

Ad Blocker is a must.

jackmoore2• 10 years ago

Can someone tell me why SVGs are gigantic while first loading? I often see this even at modern connection speeds.

vortico6• 10 years ago

Two reasons come to mind: It's likely that the designer providing the SVG logo scales the logo completely arbitrarily, which might be 1000 pixels wide. The CSS `width:10px` in another file hasn't loaded yet, so the <img> tag holding the SVG uses the absolute size of the SVG file. Another possibility is that a flexbox or similar grid system is used, and the container holding the <img> tag is told to stretch its contents to the full width of the flex item. If the content in the following flex item is very large, the SVG will be compressed to the proper small size, but if there is no content loaded yet in the following flex item, the flexbox will stretch just the first item.

jackmoore2• 10 years ago

Thanks, looked into it further on my own project and found my specific issue. The svg width and height attributes were missing from my webpack-built bundle even though they were part of the source svg file. The svg loader I was using (svg-inline-loader) was stripping with and height by default.

shakna• 10 years ago

They really don't have to be [0].

Usually happens with SVGs whose internal dimensions differ wildly from the display dimensions.

e.g. Internal canvas of 1000px x 1000px, display size of 10px.

[0] https://oddsquare.surge.sh/10/

HugoDaniel2• 10 years ago

Because people who write SVG's usually don't know about the viewBox property[0]. They just use illustrator to draw the shape and then export it.

[0]https://sarasoueidan.com/blog/svg-coordinate-systems/

wott2• 10 years ago

They just use illustrator to draw the shape and then export it.

You're lucky. Last designer I asked to provide a SVG image had obviously exported from a vector drawing tool to a bitmap, AND THEN converted to SVG. So you kinda had a whole SVG object for each pixel.

It never occurred to him that a 40 MB SVG file might indicate a problem (when the point of having a vector format was partly to save memory).

therealmarv2• 10 years ago

Google Data Compression on Chrome helps a lot. At least on HTTP connections. Too bad this does not work for HTTPS sites were the web designers do not test and optimize enough for low bandwidth.

kalleboo3• 10 years ago

Or Opera Mini, which renders pages server-side and sends a minimal representation to your phone. They even managed to convince Apple they're not a browser, so there's an iOS version.

In my 56K days, the regular Opera was my browser of choice since it had a very useful toggle for loading images or not (or showing only cached ones, or letting you load them in afterwards without a painful page refresh cycle)

tracker13• 10 years ago

You can have a browser, you just can't use your own JS engine for it, only safari's, it also proxies everything through Opera, and delivers a better mobile representation.

therealmarv2• 10 years ago

Interesting. I tested Opera Mini after your comment and it seems kind of "dangerous" for me. It also saves a lot of bandwidth on HTTPS connections so I assume it intercepts and also server rendering those connections. Saves a lot of bandwidth for sure but this is a privacy nightmare.

jasonlfunk• 10 years ago

I understand the concern. Websites can become too bloated. They can require too many resources or be poorly optimized to reduce bandwidth.

But this also seems like complaining about the trouble with driving a horse-drawn carriage on the interstate. Sure, there are lots of people around the world still on low speed networks - just like there are people who still use horses are their primary mode of travel. And maybe there should be a way to accommodate them, but let's not pretend that the advances in website technology are only a detrimental problem that needs to be solved.

ivan_gammel• 10 years ago

Significant amount of web requests is now performed via mobile connections, which, depending on a lot of factors, can be as bad as 2G. We don't use modems, of course, but we still need web sites that work on low bandwidth.

abpavel• 10 years ago

twitter/fb logos are svg, and are rendered at whatever resolution needed. I.E. svg does not have "full scale"

mntmn• 10 years ago

This reminds me: Since a while I'm looking for a good configurable proxy solution to clean up/filter the web on my server especially for browsing via old devices (Amiga and such). So I would like to reduce website to their content, stripping all CSS, background images, scripts and such. Any recommendations?

corford• 10 years ago

Squid can do this easily. Just setup an acl that blocks requests for file extensions you don't want.

  acl Blocked_extensions urlpath_regex -i "/etc/squid3/blocked.extensions.acl"
  http_access deny Blocked_extensions

The contents of /etc/squid3/blocked.extensions.acl would be something like:

  \.css$
  \.css\?.*$
  \.js$
  \.js\?.*$
  \.woff$
  \.woff\?.*$
  \.eot$
  \.eot\?.*$
  \.svg$
  \.svg\?.*$

It's also easy to run squid in transparent proxy mode if you want to support older devices that don't let you manually specify a proxy.

icomefromreddit• 10 years ago

Privoxy (https://www.privoxy.org/):

Privoxy is a non-caching web proxy with advanced filtering capabilities for enhancing privacy, modifying web page data and HTTP headers, controlling access, and removing ads and other obnoxious Internet junk. Privoxy has a flexible configuration and can be customized to suit individual needs and tastes. It has application for both stand-alone systems and multi-user networks.
Privoxy is Free Software and licensed under the GNU GPLv2.

I'm from Bangladesh, my connection is ~256 kbps and my pc is slow (256 RAM and 1.6 ghz), if not by privoxy, i couldn't browse internet.

pmontra• 10 years ago

That exoscale screenshot is very similar to what I see with NoScript on a 100 Mb/s connection before I temporarily allow their JS.

What's nice about NoScript is that I can turn on their JS but keep turned off the JS scripts from the other sites. Apparently they only use googletagmanager. Ublock doesn't report any blocked script so it's a rare well behaved site.

nitrogen• 10 years ago

Google tag manager is sometimes (often?) used to load every other third-party script, so if you allow gtm to load you'll probably see a bunch more scripts. As a web developer, gtm was the bane of my existence because marketing could change and break the site significantly, while decreasing user privacy and page speed, and the devs could take the blame.

joeyh• 10 years ago

Since I temporarily have HN's attention with this side blog of mine, can I suggest one simple tweak:

Please, please, if your site requires AJAX to work at all, then retry failed AJAX queries. Use exponential backoff or whatever but don't let the AJAX query fail once and the page be unusable.

This happens all the freaking time when I'm on dialup, and there's nothing more annoying than having filled out a form or series of forms only to have the submit button break because it used AJAX to do a sanity check and threw an exception because the server timed out after some absurdly short (dialup-wise) period of time while the client was sending the request.

izacus• 10 years ago

And doesn't happen only on dialup either, but tethered and mobile connections while commuting - when most people are using their mobile devices to browse around.

DerfK2• 10 years ago

Yeah, found this out the hard way with customers complaining that they hit save, get an error code "0", and then couldn't save again because we had disabled the button after submitting.

Side rant: can I take a moment to call out WHATWG for deciding to specify that all networking errors in XmlHttpRequest get status: 0 and absolutely no explanation anywhere in the response object ( see https://fetch.spec.whatwg.org/#concept-network-error ), making it absolutely a nightmare to diagnose problems and support our users? I suppose in a world of fail whales and cute cat pics, leaving the user in the dark as to why something broke is now standard practice, but at least in those cases there's something server side to let techs know what's going on, but I get random calls from users complaining about this and the best I've got is that they tried to leave the page while the form was still saving (this triggers the error handler too since it's the exact same code) or their internet connection dropped ever so briefly because the next words out of their mouth when they say that is "but I can view other websites".

xolb2• 10 years ago

I'm curious what do you think about AMP. Do you think it is a good solution for this? (not implying that AMP solved this problem, but rather some company as intermediary to serve you the page correctly, instead of relying on the website's owner)

JustSomeNobody4• 10 years ago

AMP isn't a solution for anything. Google should NOT be 'fixing' the web for anyone.

frik• 10 years ago

Just as annectdote, your blog site is kind of broken on smaller screens (tablet). The useless right sidebar covers almost half of the screen, and overlaps the content (only a bit more than half of it is visible).

And then there are many many users world wide who use a smartphone (small screen) and connect over GPRS or Edge (slow as modem). Bonus points when overblown sites with dozends of ads and trackers crash your browser on a mobile device, because it ate all your RAM for lunch. Every additional JS file is a pain. Tip: Keep the total JS file size below 300KB.

comboy3• 10 years ago

It's not just an easy JS fix though. It complicates quite a lot on the server side. Your timed out request could have reached the server already, so the state would different now. From the server perspective it's not clear whether it was a retry or another request (and some actions are meant to be repeatable).

Now that I think about it, generating some request UUID and passing it to the server could allow it to quickly skip duplicates (it would also need to cache responses for resending them).

I'm also curious how often this problem occurs statistically (not just in your case, but for an average user of popular sites)

akiselev• 10 years ago

Wouldn't it be easier to add a retry=true to the request, at least if your implementing exponential back off in an existing codebase? Then you just hash the request (minus the retry field) in your cache layer and send the saved response again. You'll need a little extra code to update timestamps on the client side but the server side can be implemented as middleware in most frameworks. Expire the cache after a reasonable total timeout and make the client do a new read if they try to retry after cache has cleared it.

derefr• 10 years ago

Mind you, we're talking about "sanity checks" here, not actions: presumably these are XHR GETs.

In HTTP-semantic terms, you're always allowed to retry GETs, and they're always supposed to be idempotent (or not change state at all, but that's a lost battle.)

There's no reason that the browser shouldn't default to automatically retrying (with back-off) GET XHRs, save for how many sites are built without a proper understanding of HTTP semantics.

eriknstr• 10 years ago

Then again, as a user I actually find a perpetual loader spinner animation far more annoying than a simple "oh noes server is under heavy load please come back later".

nrjdhsbsid• 10 years ago

This is at the TCP/http layer not app logic. Your machine and the servers you're connected to don't have the right settings for dialup.

Turn up retries on TCP. Increase timeouts on the servers. Etc...

cellularmitosis• 10 years ago

I've had this happen on a cell phone modem! My (large) image uploads to an online flow-chart saas started failing. Open up the chrome dev tools, turns out they all failed at exactly 20.0 seconds -- obviously a timeout issue. I had a maddening support experience in which the support tech kept insisting that he couldn't reproduce the problem from his (high bandwidth) end. I asked him to please just ask an engineer to raise the 20 second timeout, but he stone-walled me. So frustrating.

tomrod• 10 years ago

This is a fantastic way to assess website functionality. It would drive me insane on day to day use.

In all reality, I just want to dump the modern web's approach. CSS, Javascript, you name it. Give me simple HTML and text ads, if you need ads. Give me pictures when I want them, with descriptive captions. I agree with the intent of the blog--quit making crappy ads and bloated sites!

I use elinks often, and find it's text-based approach easier to comprehend. What are your thoughts?

tombh• 10 years ago

Since traveling in Asia and getting elinks into muscle memory I now use it even on good connections, it's so much more satisfying to get consistently quickly rendered text into my eyeballs.

mysterydip• 10 years ago

Agreed! I try to keep my site light. I'd like to see a return of the web to a content layer where the browser can choose how to present it. In the end we want to read content. We don't care about someone's favorite scrolling method or menu system. Why can't I set up my browser preferences to be "show me websites with a light blue background, navigate through a menu bar horizontally across the top," etc. I don't think it would happen with current inertia, but maybe that's an area for a niche browser.

jff• 10 years ago

As I understand it, early on there was sort of an expectation that users would be defining stylesheets and applying them to websites, exactly like you said: "use light blue background, menu bar horizontally across the top, paragraph text should be 16 pt." etc.

There's nothing wrong with site-provided CSS, but I strive to make my own stuff work with or without CSS.

Fifer822• 10 years ago

I don't see the problem. It isn't 1996 and I don't care about people who turn JS off. This tiny percentage of people, are dwarfed by IE9 users, which, I don't support either.

What is the moral of the story?

eponeponepon2• 10 years ago

The moral of the story is that some web people don't care about things which, had they a deeper understanding of what they do, they would intuitively grasp they should care for. QED.

Fifer822• 10 years ago

So I will ask my boss on Monday if he minds that we revisit all our projects, and refactor for the 0.01% of hipsters?

tracker13• 10 years ago

There is/was an internet news website 15seconds.com iirc, that was so named because that's how long the average person would wait for a page to load. Back in the 90's when dialup was common. I think people should try setting chrome in devtools to 2g speed now and then, so they know the pain they're causing for a lot of people on wireless without a good/stable connection.

nandhp• 10 years ago

For anyone wondering, the spinning Unicode symbol mentioned is F01E, corresponding to fa-repeat in Font Awesome: http://fontawesome.io/icon/repeat/ Font Awesome also has a bunch of spinner icons which OP is probably seeing on other sites: http://fontawesome.io/icons/#spinner

It really is unfortunate that there is no way to have these widely-used resources (Font Awesome, jQuery, etc.) cached on a long term basis across all sites that use them. (Though arguably this is easily achieved for fonts, which can be installed system-wide.)

mschuster91• 10 years ago

It really is unfortunate that there is no way to have these widely-used resources (Font Awesome, jQuery, etc.) cached on a long term basis across all sites that use them.

There is - Google, Cloudflare and jQuery offer a CDN. The problem with CDNs is that you then have a SPOF and an external dependency.

Though arguably this is easily achieved for fonts, which can be installed system-wide.

Oh please no, this always leads to problems sooner or later - for example, graphics designers tend to have LOTS of fonts installed, from all possible sources. Especially the pirated fonts tend to freak out in lots of different ways, and if there's a local() in the font-face rule, things break and you get weird bug reports...

jordache• 10 years ago

please make your site lynx compatible

gjkood• 10 years ago

If all the important content of your website can be rendered in a timely fashion through a text browser like Lynx, then you will have catered to the lowest common denominator.

Granted that is a very retro concept.

matt_morgan• 10 years ago

Somewhere between Linux, Firefox, uBlock, etc. I see a lot of this stuff on my fast connection as well. Vox looked liked that to me for a few months, maybe a year or two ago.

udfalkso• 10 years ago

If you're on a mac the Network Link Conditioner is a great way to test your stuff on a simulated slow connection.

https://medium.com/@YogevSitton/use-network-link-conditioner...

siliconwrath• 10 years ago

Another easy way to play around with network conditions is included in Chrome dev tools: https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/netw...

dgudkov• 10 years ago

The developer axiom #1: If it works on my computer then it works for everyone else.

JustSomeNobody4• 10 years ago

https://rlv.zcache.ca/works_on_my_machine_round_sticker-r56c...

colanderman• 10 years ago

I don't see a mention of the question of utmost importance – at what baud rate are you connecting?

robocat• 10 years ago

Please, please, if your site requires AJAX to work at all, then retry failed AJAX queries.

Anyone have data on the best ways to do this? Or information on the implementations used by say Gmail or Facebook?

lupin_sansei• 10 years ago

I wonder how much difference surfing with Adblock would make while connecting over a modem?

l0b0• 10 years ago

Excellent site which brings us to an obvious question: At what point should we as developers consider a site good enough? There's an infinite tail of worse and worse speeds and latencies. At some point it makes business sense to stop optimising, and for businesses with lots of users that point is inevitably before supporting 100% of users. So how do I prove to the business where the 90th and 99th percentiles are, within some reasonably scientific measure of uncertainty?

Aside: I just checked the site I'm working on. When throttling Chromium to GPRS speeds (500 ms, 50/20 kb/s) the main page has all the text on it by 16 seconds after a hard refresh.

captn3m0• 10 years ago

If anyone is actually suffering from dialup speeds and using Chrome, you should try out my extension to disable web fonts: http://github.com/captn3m0/disable-web-fonts. It blocks all network requests to font-files. Also has a couple other tips in the README for improving page-load performances over slow networks.

I wrote it when i saw suffering terrible speeds over mobile internet (EDGE) a couple years back.

After 1 minute on my modem (2016)

Related Stories